For the twentysomething Monica Lewinsky, the #MeToo movement came about 20 years too late. For anyone trying to grapple with the complicated issue of sexual harassment and abuses of male power and privilege, the 44-year-old Lewinsky’s recent essay in Vanity Fair magazine comes at the perfect time.

Written to mark the 20th anniversary of the Kenneth Starr investigation into the Whitewater scandal — the one that ended up revealing the affair between White House intern Lewinsky and President Bill Clinton — Lewinsky’s essay is a soul-searching look at one of the low points in America’s political history.

It is also a raw, emotional reminder of how far the #MeToo movement has come in such a short period of time. And how far the conversation still needs to go.

Lewinsky’s essay opens on Christmas Eve of 2017. She is having dinner with her family in Manhattan when she sees a man who turns out to be Starr. The man who investigated Lewinsky, her family and her friends. The man who turned the former intern into a political pawn, an Internet target and a late-night punchline.

The man Lewinsky had never met until Christmas Eve of 2017, when they had the following extraordinary conversation:

“Though I wish I had made different choices back then,” Lewinsky remembers saying, “I wish that you and your office had made different choices, too.”

To which Starr said, “I know. It was unfortunate.”

Well, “unfortunate” is one of the ways you can describe the fate of a young woman ground to a pulp by the gears of politics and history.

And as Lewinsky wrestles with how the 20th anniversary of the investigation and the #MeToo uprising have made her re-examine her fraught relationship with Clinton and the historical scandal that followed, other adjectives come to mind.

“Traumatic” is one of them. As the essay reminds us, the Whitewater trial, the Starr investigation and the impeachment proceedings that followed were so ugly and polarizing, you could argue that the country never really recovered from the experience. There is no doubt that Lewinsky never did.

“It was a shambolic morass of a scandal that dragged on for 13 months,” Lewinsky writes, “and many politicians and citizens became collateral damage — along with the nation’s capacity for mercy, measure, and perspective.”

Another adjective Starr could have used but didn’t was, “heartbreaking.”

It is heartbreaking that Lewinsky had to shoulder such a huge and public burden at such a young age.

It is heartbreaking that her life and career were permanently derailed, while Clinton went on to a successful post-presidential chapter marked by high-profile public service and well-compensated speaking engagements.

“He was the most powerful man on the planet,” Lewinsky says. “He was 27 years my senior, with enough life experience to know better. He was, at the time, at the pinnacle of his career, while I was in my first job out of college.”

This is the point where the forgiving rubber of compassion meets the gritty road of responsibility, and the moment when this story’s most important adjective comes into play.

That would be “complicated.” So very complicated.

When I think about Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton, I think about where I was at 22 and what kind of decisions I was capable of making.

On the one hand, I was a responsible young woman who was juggling college, a part-time job and positions at the student newspaper and radio station.

On the other hand, I had recently informed my parents that I wasn’t going to graduate in four years after all. I was totally freaked out about my major, how I was going to pay my rent and why my car was always breaking down.

What would have happened if a charismatic older man had swept into my life? What if I had feelings for that man? What if he was my boss? What if he was the boss of everybody?

I would like to think my 22-year-old self knew that having an affair with a married man would be wrong. That helping a man betray his wife and his daughter would be wrong. That a man who would put a young woman in that situation was not a man you could ever trust.

I would also like to think that if my younger self made the grave mistake of having an affair with the most powerful married man on the planet, that the world would cut me some slack.

Thanks to our post- #MeToo insight, we are realizing that power imbalances can lead to relationships that look consensual, but aren’t really. We are realizing that sexual harassment and misconduct can take many forms, and that it may take many years for the true shape of a relationship to emerge.

We are realizing that every #MeToo story is different, and that each one is complicated in its own way. People will accuse Monica Lewinsky of hopping on the hashtag bandwagon, but they’re wrong. She’s just grabbing onto a lifeline that someone should have thrown her a long time ago.